I’m curious to learn: if “they” is being added to style guides as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender, is “it” the same or is there a somewhat different meaning behind the usage?
Use "it" if someone specifically requests that "it" be used to refer to them. Don't if they do not.
Exception not the rule, but made me giggle reading your comment.
Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
I seem to recall that “they” has been in use in that manner long before non-binary arguments were something I’d heard about.
Yes, since Shakespearean times.
For example: "I saw someone walking down the street the other day, they were carrying a guitar" -> a normal use of they as the 3rd person singular pronoun.
Here's an article with details [1].
The problem of what pronoun to use for someone who is neither male or female is not new, of course. That article says:
> There have always been people who didn’t conform to an expected gender expression, or who seemed to be neither male nor female. But we’ve struggled to find the right language to describe these people—and in particular, the right pronouns. In the 17th century, English laws concerning inheritance sometimes referred to people who didn’t fit a gender binary using the pronoun it, which, while dehumanizing, was conceived of as being the most grammatically fit answer to gendered pronouns around then
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/singular-nonbi...
If you mean "no" in the sense that this specific sentence isn't true:
> Hasn’t it always been the case that you could use “they” as a way to refer to a singular human without implying any gender?
then you are mistaken, as sibling comments point out. Certainly there is a history of teaching people not to use singular 'they' (I don't know how long, but I was certainly taught it), but people have actually been using singular 'they' for a long, long time, and usage trumps fiat at least in English.
I learned a lot of wrong things in school. One could say I have spent most of my adult life unlearning them. Welcome to the club.
Consider also James Loewen's classic book, too: https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-16...
I'm not sure I agree with that argument, but it got me to think. It blends the linguistic and the philosophical.
Semantically, the difference in their singular use (prior to very recent evolutions) is that they was rarely used for specific known humams, and it was never uses for humans (but frequently for living things with sex and to whom grammatical gender corresponding to sex could also be used, in cases where the sex was unknown or unimportant, similar to the use of “they” for humans.)
So, while I find the idea of “they” as gender neutral but “it” as emphatically ungendered conceptuallt interesting, I don't really think it reflects historical usage differences.
OTOH, I suppose there could be debate about different presumptions of social gender vs grammatical gender here, too.
English doesn't have grammatical gender so this statement seems questionable to me, but that's a nitpick.
This one’s that gender, this one’s neutral gender, this one’s genderless… who cares.
If gender or plurality is key to the sentence we can add a word.
I like how in Indonesian to make a word plural you double it: pencil pencil = multiple pencils
Can we come up with a pronoun that literally means “the being or beings in question” without commenting on gender or plurality?
Of all the most useful projects to humanity (diverting asteroids, developing free energy, curing cancers, solving childhood poverty, etc) in any top-3 list I'd put "having a single common language that is super-simple to learn and master and which everybody is taught from childhood".
Let's not change English or French then, but leave them as "classical" languages, but teach kids the new easy/expressive/explicit one. No gendered nouns, no phrasal verbs, no reported speech markers, etc.
Completing this initiative makes all the other ones easier to complete. And it's not like it's much more complicated than the other complicated things we donate to and try to push forward every year.
Yes, calling someone “it” has been a ridiculously offensive thing to do in my life experience.
Edit: I suspect the answer differs from person to person.
(Die/der/das are genders).
ドイツ語はぜんぜんわからない
(wa should be ga. wa means German is the subject that is doing the not-understanding.)
I do not.
Edit: After further reading は seems to work fine. In this case I think both work but が places greater emphasis on the german language being the thing not understood. で however was totally incorrect :P. But due to the tacit nature of informal Japanese I think the context already informed the reader who doesn't understand what.
Either way, は is fine in this sentence to the best of my understanding. It marks ドイツ語 as the subject, and thus the thing being understood.
If they demand dixyzx?
What if they demand custom declensions on verbs that involve them?
Another pretty elegant solution I've found if there's too much confusion amongst our team is to suggest people switch to learning Hungarian which doesn't have gendered pronouns. A few years of intense study is a small price to pay so that we can avoid the catastrophic mistakes of accidentally calling someone who's not in the room the wrong gender
It's not randomly dehumanization, the neuter gender that the pronoun system preserves has always communicated inanimacy (read: nonhuman-ness) against the masc/fem animate genders. Etymologically, this distinction has been more primitive than the masc/fem distinction. One feature of the neuter gender is the use of the object form in languages that distinguish it from the subject form, hence he/him, she/her, but it/it.
Yes, including being a human